Given the competitive landscape of communication services, service providers need to be more innovative in seeking new sources of revenue. When developing new services, service providers are ever mindful of cost. In general, the introduction of new communication services requires a large investment in new infrastructure, not to mention development costs. It is observed that despite the popularity of the Internet and its many applications, the development of data communications are not well integrated. For example, certain data communication services, such as instant messaging (IM), are not well integrated. Traditionally, providers of these services operate autonomously, utilizing proprietary software and communication protocols to establish IM sessions.
The lack of integration of communication services is made more evident when examining the largely independent existence of telephony and data systems. That is, the advancement in services on the telephony side has not been well integrated on the data network side. Conventionally, a user is required to employ several disparate systems and service providers to engage in various modes of communication, ranging from telephony to instant messaging services.
Generally, each communication system may employ a different addressing scheme by which parties or devices are specified. For example, a user may have one or more telephones numbers; e.g., home number, work number, and cellular number. Additionally, the user may also have pager or facsimile devices, each with their own telephone numbers. Beyond these telephony-based services, other staple communication services are executed over data communication networks, such as electronic mail and information/entertainment delivery. The popularity of instant messaging has also afforded the user with yet another avenue to communicate. Yet another way that the user may engage in communication is through use of a web site. For each of these modes of communication, the user is forced to use different separate accounts with different telephone numbers and/or addresses.
Therefore, there is a need for an integrated approach to providing comprehensive communication services. There is also a need to deploy a communications service that utilizes existing infrastructure. There is a further need to support a new source of revenue for communication services.